Gender studies: women and girls Books

Book SynopsisFounder of the She Is Free conference shows you how to navigate the complications inherent in female friendship, empowering you to face yourself with honesty so that you can truly connect with other women, genuinely cheer them on, and live out your purposes--together.

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Book SynopsisA radically subversive critique brings to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.Trade ReviewThe publication of these two translations is an event to be celebrated by feminists of all persuasions. * Women's Review of Books *Table of ContentsTHE BLIND SPOT OF AN OLD DREAM OF SYMMETRYWoman, Science's Unknown How Can They Immediately Be So Sure?; The Anatomical Model; A Science That Still Cannot Make Up Its Mind; A Question of Method; What Is Involved in (Re) production, and How It Aids and Abets the Phallic Order; A Difference Not Taken into Account; The Labor "to Become a Woman"The Little Girl Is (Only) a Little Boy An Inferior Little Man; The Cards Turned Over; The Dream Interpreters Themselves; Penis Masturbation: A Necessarily Phallic Auto-eroticism; The Change of "Object" or the Crisis of a Devaluation; The Law of the Self-sameIs Her End in Her Beginning? An Unsuspected Love; The Desire to Have a Child by the Mother; The Father's Seduction: Law but Not Sex; The "Reasons" Why a Girl Hates Her Mother and a Boy Goes on Loving His; An Economy of Primal Desire That Cannot Be Represented; One More ChildAnother "Cause"—Castration As Might Be Expected; The Gaze, Always at Stake; Anatomy Is "Destiny"; What the Father's Discourse Covers Up; The Negative in Phallocentric Dialectic; Is Working Out the Death Drives Limited to Men Only?"Penis-Envy" Waiting in Vain; An Indirect Sublimation; "Envy" or "Desire" for the Penis?; Repression, or Inexorable Censorship?; Mimesis ImposedA Painful Way to Become a Woman And the Father, Neutral and Benevolent, Washes His Hands of the Matter; A (Female) A-Sex?; Is the Oedipus Complex Universal or Not?; Free Association on OnanismA Very Black Sexuality? Symptoms Almost Like Those of Melancholia; A Setback She Cannot Mourn; That Open Wound That Draws Everything to Itself; That Necessary Remainder: HysteriaThe Penis = the Father's Child The Primacy of Anal Erotism; Those Party to a Certain Lease; Woman Island Also Mother; Forbidden Games; The Hymen of Oedipus, Father and SonThe Deferred Action of Castration Capitalism without Complexes; The Metaphorical Veil of the Eternal Feminine; The Other Side of History; The Submission of a Slave?; A Super-ego That Rather Despises the Female SexAn Indispensable Wave of Passivity A Redistribution of Partial Instincts, Especially Sadistic-anal Instincts; "There Is Only One Libido"; Idealization, What Is One's Own; The (Re)productive Organ; Confirmation of FrigidityFemale Hom(m)osexuality The "Constitutional Factor" Is Decisive; Homosexual Choice Clearly Expounded; A Cure Fails for Lack of Transference(s); Female SamenessAn Impracticable Sexual Relationship An Ideal Love; Were It Not for Her Mother?; Or Her Mother-in-law?; Squaring the Family Circle; Generation Gap, or Being Historically out of Phase?; Woman's Enigmatic Bisexuality"Woman Is a Woman as a Result of a Certain Lack of Characteristics" An Ex-orbitant Narcissism; The Vanity of a Commodity; The Shame That Demands Vicious Conformity; Women Have Never Invented Anything but Weaving; A Very Envious Nature; Society Holds No Interest for Women; A Fault in Sublimation; "La Femme de Trente Ans"SPECULUM Any Theory of the "Subject" Has Always Been Appropriated by the "Masculine" Kore: Young Virgin, Pupil of the Eye On the Index of Plato's Works: Woman How to Conceive (of) a Girl Une Mère de Glace "... and if, taking the eye of a man recently dead... " La Mystérique Paradox A Priori The Eternal Irony of the Community Volume-FluidityPLATO'S HysteriaThe Stage Setup Turned Upside-down and Back-to-front; Special Status for the Side Opposite; A Fire in the Image of a Sun; The Forgotten Path; Paraphragm/Diaphragm; The Magic Show; A Waste of Time?; A Specular CaveThe Dialogues One Speaks, the Others Are Silent; Like Ourselves, They Submit to a Like Principle of Identity; Provided They Have a Head, Turned in the Right Direction; What Is = What They See, and Vice Versa; The A-letheia, a Necessary Denegation among Men; Even Her Voice Is Taken Away from Echo; A Double Topographic Error, Its ConsequencesThe Avoidance of (Masculine) Hysteria A Hypnotic Method; That Buries and Forbids "Madness"; A Remainder of Aphasia; The Misprison of Difference; The Unreflected Dazzle of SeductionThe "Way Out" of the Cave The "Passage"; A Difficult Delivery; Then Whence and How Does He Get Out?; A World Peopled by GhostsThe Time Needed to Focus and Adjust the Vision Impossible to Turn Back (or Over); Were It Not, Right Now, for a Sophistry Played with Doubles; A Frozen Nature; The Auto... Taken in by the A-letheia; Bastard or Legitimate Offspring?The Father's Vision: Engendering with No History of Problems A Hymen of Glass/Ice; The Unbegotten Begetter; Exorcism of the Dark Night; Astrology as Thaumaturgy: A Semblance (of a) Sun; A Question of PropertyA Form That Is Always the Same The Passage Confusing Big and Little, and Vice Versa; The Standard Itself/Himself; Better to Revolve upon Oneself-But This Is Possible Only for God-the-Father; The Mother, Happily, Does Not Remember; A Source-mirror of All That Is; The Analysis of That Projection Will Never Take (or Have Taken) PlaceCompletion of the Paideia The Failings of an Organ That Is Still Too Sensible; A Seminar in Good Working Order; An Immaculate Conception; The Deferred Action of an Ideal Jouissance; The End of ChildhoodLife in Philosophy Always the Same (He); An Autistic Completeness; Love Turned Away from Inferior Species and Genera/Gender; The Privilege of the Immortals; The Science of Desire; A Kore Dilated to the Whole Field of the Gaze and Mirroring HerselfDivine Knowledge The Back Reserved for God; The Divine Mystery; This Power Cannot Be Imitated by Mortals; How, Then, Can They Evaluate Their Potency?; Except over Someone Like Themselves?; The Father Knows the Front Side and Back Side of Everything, at Least in Theory; The Meaning of Death for a PhilosopherAn Unarticulated/Inarticulate Go-Between: The Split between Sensible and Intelligible A Failure of Relations between the Father and Mother; A One-way Passage; Compulsory Participation in the Attributes of the Type; A Misprized Incest and an Unrealizable IncestReturn to the Name of the Father The Impossible Regression toward the Mother; A Competition the Philosopher Will Decline to Enter; Two Modes of Repetition: Property and Proximity; Better to Work the Earth on the Father's Account Than to Return to It: Metaphor/Metonymy; The Threat of Castration"Woman's" Jouissance A Dead Cave Which Puts Representation Back into Play; That Marvelously Solitary Pleasure of God; A Diagonal Helps to Temper the Excessiveness of the One; The Infinite of an Ideal Which Covers the Slit (of a) Void; Losing Sight of "the Other"; The Vengeance of Children Freed from Their Chains

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Book SynopsisRethinking Home Economics documents the evolution of a profession from the home economics movement launched by Ellen Richards in the early twentieth century to the modern field renamed Family and Consumer Sciences in 1994.Trade ReviewA good treatment of home economics. * Workforce Education Forum *An excellent collection of essays.... From a variety of angles, this volume illuminates the history of science and culture, education, women, and politics in the U.S. * Choice *

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Book SynopsisIn A Woman's Kingdom, Michelle Lamarche Marrese explores the development of Russian noblewomen's unusual property rights. In contrast to women in Western Europe, who could not control their assets during marriage until the second half of the...Trade ReviewThis excellent book opens up the possibility of some fascinating comparisons. It illustrates, for example, how in comparison to the rest of Europe, Russia was both less bourgeois and less aristocratic.... Historians will note with interest Michelle Marrese's conclusion that female property rights were a uniquely Russian but by no means ancient phenomenon, and that they were indeed, as their advocates asserted, an important factor in enhancing the everyday freedom and life-chances of a large slice of Russian elite society.... In Professor Marrese's view, the advantages Russian noblewomen gained by control over property were far more than theoretical. They had a big impact on women's relative power, freedom and security in Russian elite society.... The place of property law within the whole Russian debate on modernization is a fascinating issue. -- Dominic Lieven * Times Literary Supplement *It is an immensely authoritative, comprehensive, and important study of value not only to Russian historians but also to all serious historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. -- Janet Hartley * American Historical Review *This is an important book, on an under-studied subject, and it makes a very valuable contribution to our knowledge of Russian women's history. -- Linda Edmondson, University of Birmingham * SEER *Marrese has carefully constructed her argument on an extraordinarily wide source base drawing from Moscow and four provincial archives: Vladimir, Kashin, Tambov, and Kursk. She has made judicial use of notarial records, records of the sale and purchase of serfs and estates, wills, dowries, deeds of separation, and petitions for divorce, along with memoirs and contemporary literature. It is difficult to find any flaw in her meticulous research.... Marrese places her argument in two significant broader contexts, that of Imperial Russian culture generally and women's property rights in Europe. -- Karen L. Taylor, Washington D.C. * H-Russia *This pathbreaking analysis of noblewomen's control of property in Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries uses an astounding range of regional and national archival sources to examine inheritance law, testamentary behavior,... and legal petitions and suits.... This book should be required reading for scholars and students in European history, women's history, women's studies and Russian history. Summing Up: Essential. * Choice *This study of noblewomen's control of property in Russia is an example of women's history at its best. It provides both a... study of Russian noblewomen's economic activity, thereby overcoming the tendency of many historians to ignore or make invisible women's role in this area, and it has important implications for the study of the Russian nobility as a whole. It is, thus, more than a corrective history of the 'marginal': rather it demands a rethinking of a whole noble culture of property, including attitudes of the Russian nobility to inheritance, to investment strategies, to the legal process, to the state, to corporate privileges for the nobility, and to a growing sense of individualism versus claims of the clan. -- Brenda Meehan, University of Rochester * Slavic Review *

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Book SynopsisGarver offers a fresh appraisal of the cultural and social history of eighth- and ninth-century women, examining changes in women's lives and in the ways others perceived women during the early Middle Ages.Trade ReviewWomen and Aristocratic Culture makes a major contribution to our understanding of early medieval and aristocratic experience. Garver is consistently able to take even unsurprising findings and well-known points and parlay them into strong planks of support for her overall thesis. -- Felica Lifshitz * Medieval Prosopography *English-speaking scholars have contributed considerably to research on Carolingian women since Suzanne Fonay Wemple's pioneering Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister 500–900, but they have produced few monographs. Valerie Garver's new book is a welcome exception, aiming to show women as 'active participants in shaping and perpetuating the behaviors, beliefs, and practices’ of Carolingian culture. * Early Medieval Europe *"Garver provides an excellent synthesis of current scholarship about aristocratic Carolingian women. Although she acknowledges the paucity of sources directly addressing women's rolesshe does a commendable job of examining the existing literature and delineating the place of women in Carolingian society. This creates a useful contribution to both women’s history and social history in the Carolingian period." —Margaret J. McCarthy * Medium Aevum *Garver's mastery of a variety of early medieval sources allows her to draw novel conclusions about the roles of aristocratic women as active participants in and shapers of Carolingian elite culture.... Women and Aristocratic Culture reveals a great deal. -- Courtney L. Luckhardt * H-France Review *Severe source constraints confront all historians of ninth-century women. The Carolingian world is relatively rich in sources but not in material overtly concerned with women. Yet Garver has read widely. For Garver, the Carolingian reforming revaluation of the aristocratic female household role was a turning point in Western views of women. That is one of many challenges to historians of earlier and later periods left by this brave book, which opens new and interesting perspectives. * American Historical Review *

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Book SynopsisRussia's Great Reforms of 1861 were sweeping social and legal changes that aimed to modernize the country. In the following decades, rapid industrialization and urbanization profoundly transformed Russia's social, economic, and cultural landscape. Barbara Alpern Engel explores the personal, cultural, and political consequences of these dramatic changes, focusing on their impact on intimate life and expectations and the resulting challenges to the traditional, patriarchal family order, the cornerstone of Russia's authoritarian political and religious regime. The widely perceived marriage crisis had far-reaching legal, institutional, and political ramifications. In Breaking the Ties That Bound, Engel draws on exceptionally rich archival documentationin particular, on petitions for marital separation and the materials generated by the ensuing investigationsto explore changing notions of marital relations, domesticity, childrearing, and intimate life among ordinary men and women in impeTrade ReviewBarbara Alpern Engel provides a captivating and well-researched book in this newest addition to her already impressive bibliography. She uses her remarkable knowledge to analyze an archival source specific to the turn of the nineteenth century. In doing so, she details rich, new glimpses into the lives of both women and men, of all social estates, specifically their perceptions of gender roles within one of the most sacred of Russian institutions—marriage.... This should be a staple for all students and scholars of Russian social and legal history. -- Katie Lynn * Slavic and East European Journal *Engel examines how Russians of various classes and estates understood marital obligations and the behavior and conditions that were egregious enough to justify loosening the ties. In the process, she examines perceptions of gender roles, how these varied by estate and class, and how attitudes shifted at the end of the nineteenth century.... The cases are fascinating and provide rare insights into Russian domestic life.... Highly recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Marriage and Its Discontents 1 The Ties That Bound 2 Making Marriage: Romantic Ideals and Female Rhetoric 3 Money Matters 4 Disciplining Laboring Husbands 5 Earning My Own Crust of Bread 6 Cultivating Domesticity 7 The Right to Love 8 The Best Interests of the Child Conclusion: The Politics of Marital Strife Appendix A. Archival Sources Appendix B. Major Cases Used in the Book Index

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Book SynopsisIn Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes. McMahon's archival research into the private documents of middling and well-to-do Americans in northern states illuminates educated women's experiences with particular life stages and relationship arcs: friendship, family, courtship, marriage, and motherhood. In their personal and social relationships, educated women attempted to live as the mere equals of men. Their often frustrated efforts reveal how early national Americans grappled with the competing issues of women's intellectual equality and sexual difference.In the new nation, a pioneering society, pushing westward and unmooring itself from established institutions, often enlisted women's labor outside the home and in areas that we would deem public. Yet, Trade ReviewBy drawing upon some forty different collections of family papers, diaries, and other documents held at libraries, historical societies, and other repositories from Massachusetts to North Carolina, McMahon has artfully pieced together the intimate textual traces of the lives lived by less-well-known women. In doing so, she productively limns the nuanced roles that both Cupid and Minerva played for American women in this crucial period of history. -- Jane Greer * The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society *In this engaging, thought-provoking book Lucia McMahon explores early national woman's education, highlighting how Americans simultaneously held notions of intellectual equality alongside belief in persistent, rigid sexual difference. They did so through their paradoxical belief that women were 'mere equals' and women's intellectual and social equality were allowed but political citizenship and participation were not. * Journal of American History *"McMahon follows the enhanced joys and unsettling challenges that learning brought to women's lives. Each chapter is built around a particularly rich body of personal materials that reveals the thoughts and actions of a pair of correspondents.... McMahon has provided an exceptionally developed picture of women’s agency during this time of socialculturaland political development. Hers is historical research and textual analysis at its bestpersuasively argued and elegantly written." —Marilyn J. Westerkamp * The Journal of Interdisciplinary History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Between Cupid and Minerva1. "More like a Pleasure than a Study": Women's Educational Experiences2. "Various Subjects That Passed between Two Young Ladies of America": Reconstructing Female Friendship3. "The Social Family Circle": Family Matters4. "The Union of Reason and Love": Courtship Ideals and Practices5. "The Sweet Tranquility of Domestic Endearment": Companionate Marriage6. "So Material a Change": Revisiting Republican MotherhoodConclusion: Education, Equality, or DifferenceList of Archives Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThe Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, identified all legitimate voters as male. In so doing, it added gender-specific language to the U.S. Constitution for the first time. Suffrage Reconstructed considers how and why the amendment''s authors made this decision. Vividly detailing congressional floor bickering and activist campaigning, Laura E. Free takes readers into the pre- and postwar fights over precisely who should have the right to vote. Free demonstrates that all men, black and white, were the ultimate victors of these fights, as gender became the single most important marker of voting rights during Reconstruction.Free argues that the Fourteenth Amendment''s language was shaped by three key groups: African American activists who used ideas about manhood to claim black men''s right to the ballot, postwar congressmen who sought to justify enfranchising southern black men, and women''s rights advocates who began to petition Congress for the ballot for Trade ReviewMuch of the work analyzing the Reconstruction constitutional amendments and their connection to women's rights has focused on the Fifteenth Amendment's restriction of suffrage to men. Hobart and William Smith College associate professor of history Laura Free's Suffrage Reconstructed expands the discussion to a detailed analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment's deliberate inclusion of the word male. While examining the expansion of voting rights, Free provides fresh insight into the dispute over who was considered worthy of full inclusion in American political life. She explains in detail how the debates led Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to ally themselves with the racist language and political philosophy of the Democratic Party. Free has made a valuable contribution to the discussion of women's rights and the history of suffrage in the United States. * The North Carolina Historical Review *The author depicts work by suffragists to turn voters against the (Fifteenth) amendment by using the racist language and stereotyping of the day, denigrating the very former slaves they had fought so hard to free. In doing so, they attempted to achieve voting rights for themselves by denying the same right to others. Free's book is an informative and sometimes shocking study of a little-known Reconstruction drama. * Choice *This book invites historians of the rise of American democracy to engage in dialogue with historians of woman suffrage. It is an invitation to be heeded. * Journal of American History *A decisive study of the evolution of American suffrage rights in the ante- and immediate post-bellum era(s), Laura Free's Suffrage Reconstructed makes significant contributions to the field of American intellectual history.... A wide audience of scholars, particularly African American and women's and gender historians would benefit from reading this text, as well as scholars interested in the political history of New York State. * New York History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: We, the People1. The White Man's Government2. Manhood and Citizenship3. The Family Politic4. The Rights of Men5. That Word "Male"6. White Women’s RightsConclusion: By Reason of RaceAcknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn Constructive Feminism, Daphne Spain examines the deliberate and unintended spatial consequences of feminism's second wave, a social movement dedicated to reconfiguring power relations between women and men.Trade ReviewA valuable addition to the literature on women and the environment that has dwindled with the waning of second-wave feminism. As I read the book, I realized how much more work remains to be done, albeit as part of the third wave. * Journal of Urban Affairs *This book is a valuable addition to introductory planning classes....reading about the challenges and obstructionist actions faced by women as they built safe spaces was a very visceral experience. * Journal of Planning Education and Research *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Spatial Consequences of the Second Wave 1. Feminist Practice: Social Movements and Urban Space 2. Women's Centers: Nurturing Autonomy 3. Feminist Bookstores: Building Identity 4. Feminist Health Clinics: Promoting Reproductive Rights 5. Domestic Violence Shelters: Protecting Bodily Integrity 6. After the Second Wave: Necessary Spaces

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Book SynopsisIn the half-century before Poland's long-awaited political independence in 1918, anxiety surrounding the country's burgeoning sex industry fueled nearly constant public debate. The Devil's Chain is the first book to examine the world of commercial sex throughout the partitioned Polish territories, uncovering a previously hidden conversation about sexuality, gender propriety, and social class. Keely Stauter-Halsted situates the preoccupation with prostitution in the context of Poland's struggle for political independence and its difficult transition to modernity. She traces the Poles' growing anxiety about white slavery, venereal disease, and eugenics by examining the regulation of the female body, the rise of medical authority, and the role of social reformers in addressing the problem of paid sex. Stauter-Halsted argues that the sale of sex was positioned at the juncture of mass and elite cultures, affecting nearly every aspect of urban life and bringing together sharTrade ReviewStauter-Halsted's careful attention to the complexities of this relationship, along with her sophisticated analysis of reactions to home-grown prostitution in the Polish lands before and after independence constitutes a tour de force The Devil's Chain is essential reading for students and scholars of Poland, the late Habsburg empire, migration, women's studies, human trafficking, and urbanization. -- Nathaniel Wood * University of Kansas, Austrian History Yearbook 48 *Keely Stauter-Halsted's new book makes a convincing case for moving prostitution to the center of our analysis of the long nineteenth century of Polish history.... The Devil's Chain is an impressive achievement, not only the best and most comprehensive English-language account available on prostitution in the Polish lands in the nineteenth century but also a thought-provoking reexamination of how Polish society as a whole was scrutinized, reimagined, and reshaped during this era. It will thus be required reading not only for students of the history of sexuality but for a wide range of scholars of Poland, Eastern Europe, and Europe as a whole. -- James Bjork, King's College London * Journal of Modern History *Analyzing an extensive array of archival and published sources, [Stauter-Halsted] brings to light the voices and experiences of the prostitutes themselves while simultaneously assessing the perceptions and anxieties surrounding prostitution that emanated from professionals and the upper classes.... She convincingly integrates the Polish issues into the broader literature on prostitution, class, urbanization, migration, and professionalization. The unique aspects of the Polish experience, for instance the complex regulation system and the Polish application of class-based eugenics, make this an important contribution to our understanding of the modernization process. This volume will be of interest to scholars of partitioned Poland, but also to those exploring issues of migration, gender, and national identity. -- Sharon A. Kowalsky, Texas A&M University-Commerce * Slavic Review *Impressive analysis reveals how discourse on the prostitute and her mileau evolved in response to a variety of factors.... Carefully researched and eloquently articulated, The Devil's Chain is an exemplary study on the complex relationship between the prostitute and the many intermediaries who studied her. Given its breadth and depth of the subject matter, The Devil's Chain will be of interest to a wide range of scholars of the history of sexuality, gender relations, and medicine. * SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL *The Devil’s Chain is a superlative reminder of the capaciousness of gender as an ideological language that infused (and infuses) widespread understandings of state, empire and nation in the modern era. It should be required reading for scholars of gender, sexuality, migration, labour and nationalism in Poland, East-Central Europe and beyond. * SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW *The Devil's Chain achieves a great deal, bringing together a wealth of material and themes into a compelling, persuasive, and novel account of Poland's development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book should stand as a model for studies of other national contexts. It deserves a wide readership, both among experts in European history and among scholars of prostitution, migration, and sex trafficking. * H-Net *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Reforming the National Body1. Out of the Shadows2. On the Abyss: The Turn to Paid Sex3. Sex and the Bourgeois Family4. Narratives of Entrapment5. Sex Trafficking and Human Migration6. The Devil's Chain7. Female Activism and the Shadow State8. The Physician and the Fallen Woman9. Purity and Danger: Prostitution Reform and the Birth of Polish Eugenics10. Sex in the New RepublicConclusion: Prostitution and the Shaping of the National Community

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Book SynopsisIn 1711, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy''s plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women''s lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South.Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life adviceboth the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqué plots of novelsformed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics, in impromptu home classrooms, rather than colleges and universities, Trade ReviewCatherine Kerrison's wonderful new book challenges scholars on a host of points. She asks us to think about how the history of the book, print culture, and reading can inform a broader intellectual history. She prods us to broaden our understanding of intellectual history to include the prescriptive literature, letters, journals, and commonplace books that formed the minds of eighteenth-century women. And she poses these questions on a ground unfamiliar and even alien to American historians: the intellectual history of women in the early South. -- Beth Barton Schweiger * The Book: Newsletter of the American Antiquarian Society *Kerrison skillfully weaves the stories of women—some famous, some obscure—into a compelling and sophisticated study. In so doing, she connects the intellectual and cultural history of the southern colonies to the better-known historiography of the Old House and raises new questions about gender, race, and the origins of a distinctive southern regional identity. * William and Mary Quarterly *Kerrison succeeds in uncovering the rich texture of women's evolving intellectual interests, concerns, and challenges throughout the eighteenth century and into the first decades of the nineteenth century.... Kerrison reconstructs southern women's intellectual lives by using a wide variety of sources more often associated with social history—wills, probate records, account books, newspapers, letters, and journals. Drawing upon these sources, Kerrison argues that although southern women faced more constraints in their intellectual development than their northern contemporaries, they nonetheless were able to construct their own intellectual identities and assert certain kinds of intellectual authority. -- Rosemarie Zagarri * North Carolina Historical Review *Table of Contents1. Toward an Intellectual History of Early Southern Women2. "The Truest Kind of Breeding": Prescriptive Literature in the Early South3. Religion, Voice, and Authority4. Reading Novels in the South5. Reading, Race, and WritingConclusion: The Enduring Problem of Female Authorship and AuthorityPostscriptAbbreviations Notes Index

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Book SynopsisOvid's Art and the Wife of Bath examines how Ovid's Ars amatoria shaped the erotic discourses of the medieval West. The Ars amatoria circulated in medieval France and England as an authoritative treatise on desire; consequently, the sexualities of the...Trade Review"Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath is one of the most exciting books I've read in my thirty-year career as a medievalist. The depth and range of Marilynn Desmond's scholarship is extremely impressive. Desmond makes the theoretical framework she is using clear, compelling, and accessible. This book should appeal to a very wide readership from classicists to medievalists to feminist scholars, for whom it will provide an exciting and sophisticated alternative to flat and reductive ideas about medieval misogyny and courtly love." -- Sherron E. Knopp, Williams College

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Book SynopsisThe first study of the role of the newspaperwoman in American literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century, this book recaptures the imaginative exchange between real-life reporters like Nellie Bly and Ida B. Wells and fictional characters...Trade ReviewAmbitious and provocative.... For historians, Lutes's well-written, acutely observed book provides a theoretically sophisticated provocation to further study. -- Patricia A. Schechter * American Historical Review *In the sensational press of a century or more ago, women did not rise by quietly doing their chores. The way to get ahead was to make oneself the story, often by assuming an undercover role and emerging to report the dangers, bodily and otherwise, that one had faced.... Jean Marie Lutes, once a reporter herself, finds scholarly diversion in reconsidering the roles sex and body played in the work of the stunt girls and the sob sisters. She also contemplates such fictional journalists as Henry James's Henrietta Stackpole, who became James's symbol of the evils of the popular press. * Columbia Journalism Review *Lutes puts her academic expertise and knowledge of the newspaper profession—she's a former staff writer for the Miami Herald—to superb use in this fascinating, clearly enunciated examination of the historical and cultural role of the American woman journalist during the decades bridging the 19th and 20th centuries.... Lutes reclaims the female reporter's pioneering and transformative position, first historically (e.g., Nellie Bly's exposing social ills; Ida B. Wells's fight against lynching), then as conjured in fiction by Henry James and such former newspaper women as Willa Cather and Edna Ferber.... Especially in consideration of today's body-conscious media culture—whether in front of, behind, or via hidden camera—Lutes's work is a revelation. * Library Journal *Lutes supports her arguments with... evidence from journalism archives as well as from pamphlets, popular novels, and other ephemera.... Her carefully considered close readings and rhetorical analyses that distinguish this project. Writing in clear, journalistic prose herself, Lutes identifies a particularly female literary tradition among these varied writers.... She focuses on the American fascination with and disdain for the female journalist, and, finally, the attempts of the journalist-turned-author to reconcile the performativity and sentimentality of female authorship with a modernist aesthetic.... Exploring a diverse array of authors across a fifty-year period, Lutes organizes her work around a unifying thesis that makes this book an important contribution to the fields of journalism, history, literary studies, and popular culture. -- Verna Kale * Journal of Popular Culture *This study's major contributions lie in its sharp refocusing of the nexus of journalism and literature in order to illuminate the contributions of women in both fields.... While Front-Page Girls is partly a recovery project, bringing to scholarly attention forgotten literary texts and episodes in media history, it is also a much-needed supplement to the longstanding discussion on the intersections of fiction and journalism. * American Literature *As Jean Marie Lutes uncovers stories of girl stunt reporters, the first African American newswomen, and sob sisters—writers who specialized in wringing tears from the reader—it becomes very clear that it would be hard for a young journalist today to have an experience like these women... thankfully. The history begins with tales of the girl student reporters who would feign madness to report from the inside of a New York City asylum or spend days in cigarette factories following young girls forced to work under sweatshop conditions. * Bust *

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Book SynopsisLike the male heroes of epic poetry, Helen of Troy has been immortalized, but not for deeds of strength and honor; she is remembered as the beautiful woman who disgraced herself and betrayed her family and state. Norman Austin here surveys...Trade ReviewThis is an exceedingly interesting and entertaining book, sparkling with wit and imagination. * The Classical Bulletin *

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Book SynopsisDuring the war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002), members of various rebel movements kidnapped thousands of girls and women, some of whom came to take an active part in the armed conflict alongside the rebels. In a stunning look at the life of women in...Trade ReviewThe book is an unsettling close-up of girls' and young women's everyday lives during and after the war. Coulter describes abduction, rape and all-pervasive violence in much greater detail than most anthropologists have dared to. She also scrutinizes the challenges that women face during demobilization, and the difficulties of reintegration and reconciliation.... Its disturbingly detailed ethnographic gaze on violence, its focus on the choiceless decisions that women (and many men) faced during the war, and on the ills of post-war reconciliation and reintegration, make it a highly recommendable book for any anthropologist who wants to learn about everyday reality in a war-torn society. -- Toomas Gross * Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. A Decade of War—Centuries of Uncertainty 2. Gendered Lives in Rural Sierra Leone 3. Abduction and Everyday Rebel Life 4. From Rape Victims to Female Fighters 5. Reconciliation or Revenge 6. Surviving the Postwar Economy 7. Coming Home—Domesticating the Bush Conclusion Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisMost crimes of sexual violence are committed by people known to the victim—acquaintances and family members. Yet politicians and the media overemphasize predatory strangers when legislating against and reporting on sexual violence. In this book, Eric...Trade ReviewJanus makes a persuasive case that by throwing vast resources at a few offenders while hiding the true scope of sexual violence, sexual predator laws do more harm than good. Not only is the public not much safer than it was before civil commitment became widespread, he writes, but we've unleashed a political monster. * Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages *Nowhere in Failure to Protect does the author minimize the damage done by criminals.... The problem, Janus says, is that extreme offenders have been incorrectly cast as the archetypal sex criminal. The result has been laws that reflect and reinforce a distorted view of sexual violence, remove resources from more effective policies, and are the signs of a constitutionally questionable 'preventive state.' Janus argues that sexual predator laws reflect a conservative backlash against hard lessons learned from the feminist movement about the systematic nature of sexual violence in society. and the fact that most sexual offenses are committed by a member of the victim's family or social circle. He identifies misconceptions about recidivism and questions 'actuarial' approaches that assign a static risk rating to an individual and ignore changes from treatment, aging, or altered circumstances. * Chronicle of Higher Education *

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Book SynopsisGarver offers a fresh appraisal of the cultural and social history of eighth- and ninth-century women, examining changes in women's lives and in the ways others perceived women during the early Middle Ages.Trade ReviewWomen and Aristocratic Culture makes a major contribution to our understanding of early medieval and aristocratic experience. Garver is consistently able to take even unsurprising findings and well-known points and parlay them into strong planks of support for her overall thesis. -- Felica Lifshitz * Medieval Prosopography *English-speaking scholars have contributed considerably to research on Carolingian women since Suzanne Fonay Wemple's pioneering Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister 500–900, but they have produced few monographs. Valerie Garver's new book is a welcome exception, aiming to show women as 'active participants in shaping and perpetuating the behaviors, beliefs, and practices’ of Carolingian culture. * Early Medieval Europe *"Garver provides an excellent synthesis of current scholarship about aristocratic Carolingian women. Although she acknowledges the paucity of sources directly addressing women's rolesshe does a commendable job of examining the existing literature and delineating the place of women in Carolingian society. This creates a useful contribution to both women’s history and social history in the Carolingian period." —Margaret J. McCarthy * Medium Aevum *Garver's mastery of a variety of early medieval sources allows her to draw novel conclusions about the roles of aristocratic women as active participants in and shapers of Carolingian elite culture.... Women and Aristocratic Culture reveals a great deal. -- Courtney L. Luckhardt * H-France Review *Severe source constraints confront all historians of ninth-century women. The Carolingian world is relatively rich in sources but not in material overtly concerned with women. Yet Garver has read widely. For Garver, the Carolingian reforming revaluation of the aristocratic female household role was a turning point in Western views of women. That is one of many challenges to historians of earlier and later periods left by this brave book, which opens new and interesting perspectives. * American Historical Review *

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Book SynopsisPutting the Barn Before the House features the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in south-central New York. Grey Osterud explores the flexible and varied ways that families shared labor.Trade ReviewBuilding on her 1991 book Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York, Grey Osterud returns to the Nanticoke Valley of south-central New York State, this time with a focus on the early 20th century.. Personal narratives, interviews with two dozen women over many years, are at the core, and are the greatest strength, of the book.. Osterud makes a compelling case that gender flexibility and integration, reciprocity, mutual aid, social equality and collective action were the core values of the rural way of life in the Nanticoke Valley for generations. -- Sarah Carter * Social History *In 1993, historian Hal S. Barron called Grey Osterud's Bonds of Community 'the most thorough and sophisticated reconstruction of the relationships between rural men and women that we have for the nineteenth century.' In Putting the Barn before the House, which Osterud describes as the sequel to Bonds of Community, she carries the story of Nanticoke Valley farmers into the twentieth century. Using the same exhaustive research and careful analysis, Osterud demonstrates that in Nanticoke Valley, farm families maintained flexible gender roles and strong mutual-aid networks, as well as a 'culture of mutuality,' well into the twentieth century. Men and women agreed that 'putting the barn before the house' was a vital strategy to enable the family to persist on the land and convey it to the next generation. Osterud's gracefully written book is a masterful contribution to rural and agricultural history. Putting the Barn before the House is an exemplary work for historians in any speciality that explores rural and urban social and labor history. * Journal of American Studies *In this delightful sequel to Bonds of Community, Grey Osterud carries her analysis of family-based agriculture in south-central New York's Nanticoke Valley into the first half of the twentieth century. Osterud masterfully plumbs interviews she conducted with twenty-four women born before 1917, drawing on feminist theory and oral history theory for interpretative insights. Her interviews suggest that concepts of separate spheres and autonomy were foreign to the understandings and experiences of rural women in the earlyt twentieth century. * American Historical Review *Overall, Putting the Barn before the House succeeds marvelously in accomplishing what it sets out to do, both argumentatively and methodologically.... To be sure, during the past fifteen or twenty years, many studies have carried a brief for oral history research, but few have done so as persuasively as Osterud's. Nor have many studies done a better job of harmonizing information gleaned from oral histories with source material found in more traditional archives.... Osterud has provided readers with a very compelling, meticulously well-researched study that should be of interest of scholars working in a number of different fields. -- Colin R. Johnson * Enterprise and Society *Thoroughly researched and skillfully organized, the well-crafted narrative provides readers with both a sense of place and a sense of history. * Choice *In this fascinating book Grey Osterud delves into the lives of two dozen women from the Nanticoke Valley in New York to explore women's role in farming and community over time.... Her current book is rich with insight into the patterns of change over time. For those committed to understanding the lives of farm women, this book should not be missed. -- Carrie A. Meyer * The Journal of American History *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Nanticoke Valley in the Early Twentieth CenturyPart I: Gender, Power, and Labor 1. Putting the Barn Before the House 2. Women's Place on the LandPart II: Farming and Wage-Earning 3. "Buying a Farm on a Small Capital" 4. The Transformation of Agriculture and the Rural EconomyPart III: The Division of Labor and Relations Of Power 5. Sharing and Dividing Farm Work 6. Intergenerational and Marital Partnerships 7. Wage-Earning and Farming Families 8. Negotiating Working RelationshipsPart IV: Organizing the Rural Community 9. Forming Cooperatives and Taking Collective Action 10. Home Economics and Farm Family EconomiesConclusion: Gender, Mutuality, and Community in RetrospectNotes Index

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Book SynopsisFor decades, NGOs targeting world hunger focused on ensuring that adequate quantities of food were being sent to those in need. In the 1990s, the international food policy community turned its focus to the hidden hunger of micronutrient deficiencies, a problem that resulted in two scientific solutions: fortification, the addition of nutrients to processed foods, and biofortification, the modification of crops to produce more nutritious yields. This hidden hunger was presented as a scientific problem to be solved by experts and scientifically engineered smart foods rather than through local knowledge, which was deemed unscientific and, hence, irrelevant. In Hidden Hunger, Aya Hirata Kimura explores this recent emphasis on micronutrients and smart foods within the international development community and, in particular, how the voices of women were silenced despite their expertise in food purchasing and preparation. Kimura grounds her analysis in case studies of attempts to enriTrade Review"Drawing upon theoretical foundations in feminist food studies, agrofood studies, and science and technology studies, Kimura constructs a nuanced critique of the discourses and practices that constitute the focus on micronutrient deficiencies as the primary problem of hunger and malnutrition in the developing world. She raises crucial questions about how casting the problem of hidden hunger as a technical matter requiring expert intervention has simultaneously brought attention to women as innocent victims of nutritional ignorance, shamed them for not providing proper nourishment for their children, and silenced their ability to contribute their perspectives despite their intimate knowledge of the experiences of malnutrition and the daily challenges of feeding their families." —Jessica Loyer,Graduate Journal of Food StudiesTable of Contents1. Uncovering Hidden Hunger2. Charismatic Nutrients3. Solving Hidden Hunger with Fortified Food4. Bound by the Global and National: Indonesia's Changing Food Policies5. Building a Healthy Indonesia with Flour, MSG, and Instant Noodles6. Smart Baby Food: Participating in the Market from the Cradle7. Creating Needs for Golden Rice8. ConclusionNotes References Index

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Book SynopsisNew perspectives on marital relations, domesticity, and intimate life in imperial Russia.Trade ReviewBarbara Alpern Engel provides a captivating and well-researched book in this newest addition to her already impressive bibliography. She uses her remarkable knowledge to analyze an archival source specific to the turn of the nineteenth century. In doing so, she details rich, new glimpses into the lives of both women and men, of all social estates, specifically their perceptions of gender roles within one of the most sacred of Russian institutions—marriage.... This should be a staple for all students and scholars of Russian social and legal history. -- Katie Lynn * Slavic and East European Journal *Engel examines how Russians of various classes and estates understood marital obligations and the behavior and conditions that were egregious enough to justify loosening the ties. In the process, she examines perceptions of gender roles, how these varied by estate and class, and how attitudes shifted at the end of the nineteenth century.... The cases are fascinating and provide rare insights into Russian domestic life.... Highly recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Marriage and Its Discontents 1 The Ties That Bound 2 Making Marriage: Romantic Ideals and Female Rhetoric 3 Money Matters 4 Disciplining Laboring Husbands 5 Earning My Own Crust of Bread 6 Cultivating Domesticity 7 The Right to Love 8 The Best Interests of the Child Conclusion: The Politics of Marital Strife Appendix A. Archival Sources Appendix B. Major Cases Used in the Book Index

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Book SynopsisWomen without Men illuminates Russia's "quiet revolution" in family life through the lens of single motherhood. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data, Jennifer Utrata focuses on the puzzle of how single motherhood—frequently seen as a social problem in other contexts—became taken for granted in the New Russia.Trade ReviewA babushka is more valuable to a mother than a man, but her work goes unrecognized. Such is a major finding of Jennifer Utrata's engaging and well-researched book on single motherhood in contemporary Russia. In it, she dissects the forces, in particular the discourses, that shape Russian families today, repeatedly challenging conventional wisdom and scholarly dogma aboutthe lives of single mothers.... Overall, Utrata’s book is an exceptional discussion of many aspects of family life that clarifies a complicated environment without oversimplifying it. Her discoveries that challenge conventions of social science – particularly that the cure for single motherhood is marriage – should not be ignored. As Utrata notes in her conclusion, her research is relevant not only to the study of Russian society, but also American society, with its high rates of marriage, divorce, and single motherhood. This book is an important contribution to social science research, and also an informative and very readable overview of contemporary Russian family life that is valuable to anyone studying Russia today. -- Lisa Woodson * Canadian-American Slavic Studies *One great strength of Utrata’s book is that she speaks to populations adjacent to single mothers as well, engaging with grandmothers caring for their adult daughters’ offspring, married mothers, and fathers. This work embeds her study of single motherhood in a larger landscape of transforming gender ideologies and gender relations. It also reveals that both men and women, regardless of age or marital status, share the belief that men are undependable and that womenare almost superhumanly strong. Approaching this study from multiple perspectives not only increases the depth and texture of answers to inquiries, but elicits new questions to be asked. * Women East-West *Currently, family life in Russia is undergoing what Jennifer Utrata aptly calls a 'quiet revolution,'a shift from a two-parent to a single-parent family model. InWomen without Men,she presents a comprehensive and multidimensional portrait of this process. Overall, the text sheds light on the previously understudied topic of single motherhood in Russia, contributing not only to Russian studies but to the sociology of gender in general. It provides a useful look on how neoliberal policies affect families on the global scale, how families respond to it, and how changes in Russian family structure may help us to understand and contextualize similar developments in American families. -- Alexander Novitskaya * The Russian Review *Even as I would have welcomed more discussion of single motherhood's impact on children; of fathers’ treatment of children as a factor in mothers’ decisions to leave or stay; and the historian in me a longer temporal perspective, I very much appreciated what Utrata does accomplish. For its illuminating treatment not only of single motherhood but also of Russia’s contemporary gender order and the policies and rhetoric that have shaped it, I recommend her book enthusiastically. -- Barbara Alpern Engel * Slavic Review *In Women without MenJennifer Utrata focuses on one of the most significant implications of Russia's transition from state socialism to market capitalism the growth of single motherhood.... In her study Utrata take the readers inside the modern Russian family illuminating how recent sociopolitical transformations affect people’s private life. -- Anna Shadrina * Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics & Society *In this engaging, deceptively unassuming work, Jennifer Utrata manages to challenge several bodies of scholarship and offer a persuasive argument for rethinking many key assumptions underlying theories of family life, poverty, and gender. Although, as the subtitle indicates, the book focuses on post-Communist Russia, Utrata's ultimate goal is to broaden the way in which we view single motherhood more generally, with particularly important potential consequences for poor women of color in the United States. -- Judith Record McKinney * American Journal of Sociology *The post-Soviet Russian society is in transition from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism. Utrata (Univ. of Puget Sound) focuses on its implications for single motherhood, family life, and gender relations. Through case studies and respondents' voices, this comparative, insightful analysis emphasizes the cultural meaning of single motherhood. This excellent book makes a major contribution to family, gender, and Russian studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. -- D. A. Chekki * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Quiet Revolution1. From State Protections to Post-Socialist "Freedoms": The Changed Context of Single Motherhood2. Diminishing Material Difficulties: Single Motherhood beyond Survival Strategies3. "Where the Women Are Strong": Navigating Practical Realism4. It Takes a Babushka: Single Mothers' Youth Privilege and Grandmother Support5. Blurred Boundaries: Married Mothers and the Specter of Single Motherhood6. Marginalized Men: Settling for the Status QuoConclusion: Normalized Gender CrisisNotes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisMihoko Suzuki sheds light on a literary tradition that seemingly holds Helen of Troy and her descendants responsible for causing epic conflicts, while it appropriates the woman's perspective as a source of insight and poetic power. "A superb study of...Trade ReviewA superb study of the uses and abuses of female characters in the epic tradition and their complex, sympathetic treatment by male poets. * Choice *

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Book SynopsisDublin provides a broad account of women's work during the industrial transformation of America, testing the typicality of the factory experience against other forms of female employment.Trade ReviewIn his impressively researched book, Thomas Dublin examines the transformation of women's work in New England, the first American region to be reshaped by the Industrial Revolution.... A valuable addition to the scholar's shelf. The data provide the single most detailed description of women and work a century ago. * New York Times Book Review *No historian has done more to illuminate the achievements of female labor in the early textile mills than Thomas Dublin.... In this latest book, he provides a broad account of women's work during the industrial transformation of America, giving us the chance to test the typicality of the factory experience against other forms of female employment. He mines a breathtaking array of sources, including business records, census data, deeds, wills, diaries, and personal correspondence, to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding women's work in New England from the 1820s to 1900.... Dublin's ingenious detective work in matching families in archival sources enables him to make important points. * Women's Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis important book, wide ranging, carefully researched, closely argued, and immaculately presented, demands and deserves rigorous intellectual engagement. * The Yearbook of English Studies *A provocative and committed piece of criticism. * Modern Philology *Table of Contents1. The Feminization of Ideology: An Introduction 2. The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves 3. Staging Sexuality: Violence and Pleasure in the Domestic She-Tragedy 4. Capitalizing on Women: Dress, Aesthetics, and Alexander Pope 5. Amazons and Africans: Daniel Defoe 6. Imperial Disclosures: Jonathan Swift

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Book SynopsisLooking back at images of violence in the popular culture of early modern England, we find that the specter of the murderer loomed most vividly not in the stranger, but in the familiar. A gripping exploration of seventeenth-century accounts of domestic murder in fact and fiction, this book is the first to ask why.Trade ReviewDangerous Familiars is a richly textured book that opens up a variety of texts and places them in a complex historical perspective. Dolan's main argument is that the 'familiar' in early modern discourse was frequently construed as a prime source of danger to those within the domestic circle.We may think first of the witch's putative companion in evil, but Dolan, while she devotes her final chapter to witchcraft, wants also to remind us that common and everyday familiars had their pressing dangers-in the form, for example, of tyrannical masters, rebellious household servants, and murderous wives, husbands, or parents. Fear and anxiety about the known rather than the unknown is her theme. Her focus is on violent crime, more precisely on the representation of such crime, whether it appears in legal documents and statutes, ballads, broadsides and pamphlets (the tabloids of their time), learned discourse, or drama. -- Anthony B. Dawson * Shakespeare Quarterly *Dangerous Familiars is of more than merely antiquarian interest. Dolan's analysis of the social pressures motivating the production of pamphlets, ballads, and plays, which spread the 'news' of domestic crime in the 1590s, for example, raises intriguing questions about the modes of cultural dissemination that bring us high-tech 'gavel to gavel' coverage of courtroom dramas. Equally relevant to contemporary cultural criticism is her careful unraveling of the complex articulations of gender, race, and class, that inform such cultural productions. -- Natasha Korda * MLN *In this brilliant andinnovative book, Frances Dolan argues that the home was no more a refuge from violence in early modern England than it is in twentieth-century North America. Dolan considers not only textual representations of domestic violence but also visual materials, notably the woodcuts included on pamphlet title pages to advertise the sensational wares within. -- Margaret W. Ferguson * Modern Philology *

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Book SynopsisUntil recently, historians tended to dismiss home economics as little more than a conspiracy to keep women in the kitchen. This landmark volume initiates collaboration among home economists, family and consumer science professionals, and women''s historians. What knits the essays together is a willingness to revisit the subject of home economics with neither indictment nor apology. The volume includes significant new work that places home economics in the twentieth century within the context of the development of women''s professions.Rethinking Home Economics documents the evolution of a profession from the home economics movement launched by Ellen Richards in the early twentieth century to the modern field renamed Family and Consumer Sciences in 1994. The essays in this volume show the range of activities pursued under the rubric of home economics, from dietetics and parenting, teaching and cooperative extension work, to test kitchen and product development. ExploratiTrade ReviewA good treatment of home economics. * Workforce Education Forum *An excellent collection of essays.... From a variety of angles, this volume illuminates the history of science and culture, education, women, and politics in the U.S. * Choice *

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1980 and recently out of print, Liberty''s Daughters is widely considered a landmark book on the history of American women and on the Revolution itself.Trade Review'[An] excellent book…[Norton's] first concern… is to trace the decline of patriarchy; the growth of free choice of a spouse; the rise of marital equality…the greater equality in educational attainments; the more intense concern of parents for the proper education of children; the greater permissiveness in child-rearing; and the increased cooperation between spouses in birth control…[Her] fascinating documentation, drawn from a vast range of manuscript sources, establishes the facts beyond any reasonable doubt…Norton suggests that the change resulted from… two factors. The first was the practical experience of women during the long years of revolutionary upheaval…The second…was the impact of egalitarian and republican ideology." ~Lawrence Stone, New York Times Book ReviewTable of ContentsPART I: THE CONSTANT PATTERNS OF WOMEN'S LIVES 1. The Small Circle of Domestic Concerns 2. The Important Crisis upon Which Our Fate Depends 3. Fair Flowers, If Rightly Cultivated 4. In What Would You Shew Your Activity? 5. As Independent as Circumstances Will AdmitPART II: THE CHANGING PATTERNS OF WOMEN'S LIVES 6. We Commenced Perfect Statesmen 7. Necessity Taught Us 195 8. A Reverence of Self 9. Vindicating the Equality of Female IntellectConclusion: A New Era of Female History Abbreviations Appearing in the Sources and References Glossary of Major Families and Sources Essay on Sources Chapter References Index

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Book SynopsisVirgin martyrs make up one of the largest categories of medieval saints. To judge by their frequent appearances in art and literature, they also figure among the most venerated. The legends of virgin martyrs, retold in various ways through the...Trade ReviewEven though medieval martyr legends seem to be bizarre, grotesque even, at time pornographic, sadistic, and also fanatical, modern scholarship has realized the considerable value of this literary genre for the history of mentality, popular religion, woman's history, and the history of popular culture....Winstead's 'Chaste Passions' will be a pleasant addition to many reading lists. -- Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona * Mediaevistik *These saints' stories are anything but saintly. The tales Winstead translates... are instead gory, horrific accounts of hell's fury, religious devotion, and endless purity. Modern readers may expect these old religious stories to seem lame by today's standards. Not so. The stories remain moving, shocking and entertaining even hundreds of years after they were written... Winstead couples informative essays with translations of intriguing stories to give readers keen insight into the virgin martyr legends, a view once reserved only for scholars. -- Marjory Raymer * ForeWord Magazine *I must again emphasise how impressive, overall, this collection truly is, and how Winstead's translations will open up possible classroom discussions.... This is a fine anthology, and an important, and—it must be said—fun addtion to any bookshelf. -- Jacqueline Jenkins, University of Calgary * Arthuriana *

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Book SynopsisThis absorbing and award-winning biography tells the story of the tragedies and triumphs of Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896)—at once artist, composer, editor, teacher, wife, and mother of eight children.Trade ReviewClara Schumann was one of the remarkable women of the nineteenth century, and she deserves this well-documented biography.... This is the best modern study of Clara Schumann available in English. * New York Times Book Review *Foremost among the strengths of this book is the delineation of Schumann's character. While pointing out the overwhelming challenges and devastating losses that dogged her entire life, Reich makes no attempt to paint her as a saint or hero.... The first edition of this book has gained acceptance as a standard resource on Clara Schumann. This revised edition preserves the strengths of the first edition while adding additional information and a fine-tuning of the presentation, assuring that Reich's work will remain central to the subject for the foreseeable future. * Notes: Journal of the Music Library Association *In addition to telling us the story of Clara Schumann's life, Nancy B. Reich... includes chapters on Clara Schumann's children, her work as editor, performing artist, and teacher, and her relationships with Brahms, Joachim, Liszt, and other major figures of the era.... There is also a list and analysis of Clara Schumann's compositions.... Reich has written an eminently readable, well-researched, and thoughtful book that gives historical and psychological insights into one of the major artists of the nineteenth century. * Classical Music Guide Forums *Reich's first edition contributed to the increase in interest in Clara Schumann and in the performances and recordings of her music. The publication of this revised edition will continue to stir interest with the availability of new documents, letters and the extensive list of newly published music; further, this new edition offers a much more detailed look at Clara Schumann's life and music. * Journal of the International Association of Women in Music *The marvelous originality of Reich's book lies in the way she places the marriage and the celebrated friendship with Brahms in perspective among other critical factors in Clara's life. Reich's painstaking, scholarly detail and feminist insight recover not merely the events in the life, dramatic as they were, but its major themes, movements and connecting threads. * Women's Review of Books *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface to the Revised Edition Preface to the First Edition Acknowledgments to the Revised Edition Acknowledgments to the First EditionPart I. The Life of Clara Schumann 1. Prelude: The Wiecks of Leipzig 2. Career Begins 3. Robert Schumann and the Wiecks 4. The Break with Wieck 5. Marriage 6. The Dresden Years 7. Düsseldorf and the Death of Robert Schumann 8. The Later YearsPart II. Themes from the Life of Clara Schumann 9. Schumann and Johannes Brahms 10. Friends and Contemporaries 11. Clara Schumann as Composer and Editor 12. The Concert Artist 13. Clara Schumann as Student and TeacherCatalogue of WorksNotes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn the two decades since Feminism and Suffrage was first published, the increased presence of women in politics and the gender gap in voting patterns have focused renewed attention on an issue generally perceived as nineteenth-century. For this new...Trade ReviewThe women's suffrage movement is commonly viewed in one of two ways: as completely synonymous with nineteenth-century feminism, or as a corruption, a dilution of it. DuBois shows that neither analysis is accurate but that both political paths converged into a social movement that affected American history at least as much as the black liberation and labor movements—whose support it failed to win.... DuBois has given us a work of scholarly insight written in an animated style; she is generous in her portraits of and quotes from the foremothers. For feminists today, this book is a critical reminder that alliances are best made from a position of independently acquired strength. -- Robin Morgan * Ms. Magazine *This thoughtful and highly readable analysis is a valuable contribution to both the history of feminism and the history of nineteenth-century America. * Kirkus Reviews *

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Book SynopsisSince World War II, Okinawa has been the stage where the United States and Japan act out dramatic changes in their relationship. Women from three generations, each with a different account of the ways that international affairs have transformed...Trade ReviewKeyso's book emphasizes the many positive features of Okinawan women's postwar experience without disguising the hardship and discrimination they have variously experienced. Furthermore, the way in which she has chosen her interviewees... only serves to deepen our understanding of the complex problems raised by the U.S. presence on Okinawa... In short, Keyso provides us with a fascinating perspective on Okinawan history and women's place within it. -- Fiona Webster * The Japan Times *

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Book SynopsisPopular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society. In...Trade ReviewLandes focuses on how revolutionary leaders used images to fashion gender and national identities for the revolutionary nation's new citizens. -- Lisa Jane Graham, Haverford College * Journal of Modern History *Landes argues that visual images contain their own powerful discourse that is simply absent in regularly printed words.... This fascinating examination of political prints raises central questions for the study of gender and politics during the French Revolution. -- Gary Kates, Pomona College * American Historical Review *Women were prevented from being politically active, but Landes finds that the depiction of France as a desirable female body worked to eroticize patriotism, bind male subjects to the emerging society, and invite women to identify with the project of nationalism. * Book News *Landes explores the ever-present paradoxes within the sad events that revolutionary French society experienced in the 18th century, capturing in the poignant images the tragic-comic reality. She traces the interconnections between pictorial and textual political arguments and concentrates on images of both women and men, in a deeply scholarly and erudite manner.... Her research is outstanding.... Highly recommended. * Choice *

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Book SynopsisWomen held a central place in long-settled rural communities like the Nanticoke Valley in upstate New York during the late nineteenth century. Their lives were limited by the bonds of kinship and labor, but farm women found strength in these bonds as...Trade ReviewIn Bonds of the Community Nancy Grey Osterud draws a richly textured account of the lives of nineteenth-century farm people of the Nanticoke Valley in New York State. * Contemporary Sociology *Osterud's work deserves careful attention from historians of women, rural life, and nineteenth-century American. * American Historical Review *

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Book Synopsisand judicial sources can and cannot be used to discover that Greek and Roman men thought about women.Table of ContentsForewordTranslator's NotePrefaceIntroductionPart I. GreeceChapter 1. Matriarchy in Prehistory, Myth and HistoryChapter 2. Origins of Western MisogynyChapter 3. Exclusion from the PolisChapter 4. Philosophers and WomenChapter 5. Women and LiteratureChapter 6. Homosexuality and LoveChapter 7. The Hellenistic Age: New Images, Old StereotypesPart II. RomeChapter 8. The Hypothesis of MatriarchyChapter 9. The Period of the Kings and the RepublicChapter 10. The Principate and the Empire: The Emancipation of Women?Chapter 11. The Byzantine EmpireConclusionAbbreviations Used in the NOtesNotesIndexBooks in the Series

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAn immensely ambitious, complicated and pioneering study that is sure to have a major impact on historians... [The] book is a series of essays that trace the representation of gender, as well as women's actual participation in public life. Women's Review of Books Ryan's elegant essays sketch a chronology of changing gender symbology and contribute to our understanding of the cultural construction of boundaries between public and private. Historians and feminists will pursue for some time her questions about the process and consequences of excluding women from the public arena and their striving for participation in it. -- Lee Chambers-Schiller American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments Chapter 1. Ceremonial Space: Public Celebration and Private Women Chapter 2. Everyday Space: Gender and Geography of the Public Chapter 3. Political Space: Of Prostitutes and Politicians Chapter 4. The Public Sphere: Of Handkerchiefs, Brickbats, and Women's RightsEpilogueNotes Index

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Book SynopsisThe general category of 'woman' muddles the binaries between mother and whore, self and Other, center and periphery."-from the IntroductionTrade ReviewScholars of the emergent empire in the 18th century should see sexuality in terms of feminism's internal structures and its 'Othering'. Nussbaum discusses polygamy in African narratives and in England, examining Mary Wollstonecraft's work, Anna Falconbridge's narrative of her voyages to Sierra Leone, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's description of her timein Turkey. She also looks at prostitution, romance, sati, and a variety of other subjects found in travel literature, thereby providing a view of both the Englishwomen and the Other woman... Nussbaum succeeds in making the 'ideological working of empire and Englishwomen's complicity within it more legible. Choice Self-consciously exemplifies what a feminist new historicism would look like; Nussbaum's introduction and opening two chapters technically but clearly lay out a fresh approach to eighteenth-century writing about the self and to autobiography in general. -- Mitzi Myers Women's Review of Books An exemplary model of political criticism. -- Shawn Lisa Maurer Eighteenth-Century Fiction

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Book SynopsisThe material lives of rural upcountry women improved dramatically by midcentury-yet in becoming middle class, Walker concludes, the women found their experiences both broadened and circumscribed.Trade ReviewAn engaging study... For upcountry southern women, the years 1919-1941 were indicative of the economic, political, and social chaos existing throughout segregated America... Walker capably demonstrates how families were forced by the limitations of race and class to choose situations that provided little or no real opportunity, but she also brilliantly illustrates how some rural people were able to adapt to change. -- Valerie Grim Journal of American History Voices of ordinary women who experienced extraordinary changes resonate in Melissa Walker's incisive study of twentieth-century transformations of southern agricultural communities. -- Elizabeth D. Schafer H-SAWH, H-Net Reviews Melissa Walker has done an admirable job of mining oral interviews, TVA records, letters, diaries, and farming magazines to piece together the story of how women contributed to the family income... Walker deftly negotiates the intersection of race, class, and gender. -- Gaul Graham Journal of East Tennessee History Walker shows how women adapted to rapid change with courage, strength, creativity, and persistence... Walker's fine regional study will be useful to historians of women, the South, Appalachia, rural life, and labor issues. A valuable addition to the growing number of works on women in the early-twentieth-century South. -- Suzanne Marshall History: Reviews of New Books Historian Melissa Walker provides an account of changes in women's labor practices and economic activity in the upcountry South during the inter-war years... Readable, credible, and well-researched. -- Shaunna L. Scott Journal of Appalachian Studies The theme of the study is to show how the status of farm women changes from 1919-1941 in a period of economic crisis. Changing from a region of subsistence farming to one of commercial farming and interference by government action during the depression and New Deal years, women learned to cope... [Walker's] descriptions of rural ways and beliefs are true to form. -- Cline E. Hall South Carolina Historical Magazine Walker does a particularly good job of emphasizing the ambivalence that upcountry farm women felt about leaving the farms... All We Knew Was to Farm makes an extremely important contribution to rural literature by gendering the transformation of the upland South. -- Rebecca Sharpless Georgia Historical Quarterly Walker provides a much needed account of the South that should be of interest to all those who study the twentieth century. -- Kathleen Mapes Journal of Social History 2005Table of ContentsContents:List of Figures List of Tables AcknowledgementsIntroduction: "All We Knew Was to Farm" 1. Rural Life in the Upcountry South: The Scene in 1920 2. Making Do and Doing Without: Farm Women Cope with the Economic Crisis, 1920-1941 3. "Grandma Would Find Some Way to Make Some Money": Farm Women's Cash Incomes 4. Mixed Messages: Home Extension Work among Upcountry Farm Women in the 1920s and 1930s 5. Government Relocation and Upcountry Women 6. Rural Women and Industrialization 7. Farm Wives and Commercial Farming 8. "The Land of Do Without": The Changing Face of Sevier County, Tennessee, 1908-1940 Epilogue: The Persistence of Rural ValuesAbbreviations Notes Bibliographical Essay Index

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Book SynopsisLuciak cautions that while active measures to advance the political role of women have strengthened formal gender equality, only the joint efforts of both sexes can lead to a successful transformation of society based on democratic governance and substantive gender equality.Trade ReviewAn important contribution to the study of the democratization processes in Central America from a gender perspective. -- Monica Escudero Canadian Journal of Political Science Ilja A. Luciak argues persuasively that examining the [revolutionary] process through the lens of gender can give us important insights into the degree of democratic consolidation that has taken place in three key countries... Whatever lessons we may take from this excellent comparative study, it is very clear that an end to conflict in the Central American region is only the beginning of the process of constructing a just and lasting peace. -- Florence E. Babb Hispanic American Historical Review Luciak sets out to provide a balanced assessment of the revolutionary Left's record on gender equality in the years after former guerilla movements were transformed into political parties... Luciak's study confirms the persistence of patriarchy in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary politics of Central America. -- Waltraud Queiser Morales Perspective on Politics This is a book not to be missed by anyone with an interest in transitions from revolution to democratic consolidation. -- Lorraine Bayard de Volo Journal of Latin American StudiesTable of ContentsContents:List of Tables Preface and Acknowledgments List of AcronymsChapter 1: The Gender Composition of the Central American Guerrilla Movements Chapter 2: Gender Equality and the Central American Peace Accords Chapter 3: Voices from the Salvadoran Grass Roots: A Case Study of San Jose Las Flores, Meanguera, and San Esteban Catarina Chapter 4: The Vanguard in Search of a New Identity: Incipient Democratization Chapter 5: Transforming the Party: Gender Equality in the Revolutionary Left Chapter 6: Gender Equality and Recent ElectionsConclusion Gender Equality and DemocratizationNotes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisRedmont, Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; Cynthia Russett, Yale University; Tracy Schier, Boston College.Trade ReviewA richly documented and provocatively analyzed work. -- Fernanda Perrone History of Education Quarterly Kudos to Schier and Russet for providing this book as a catalyst and charging scholars to continue work they have begun. Anyone interested in the history of higher education should read it as a first step in understanding a group of colleges that has been invisible and ignored. Anyone interested in women's issues should read it for its story of female initiative on a grand scale. -- Sylvia Simmons Connection This is a valuable book. I consider myself well-informed about US Catholic women's colleges in the twentieth century, but I learned a great deal from it... A much-needed supplement to the standard histories of Catholic education. -- Regina Bannan Equal wRites Outstanding... This excellent anthology should be included in future research and teaching for historians of education, American Catholicism, and American women. -- Carol K. Coburn Journal of American History A much needed exploration of these unique institutions. -- Sandra Yocum Mize Religious Studies Review This book will be welcome by all interested in an inclusionary history of American Catholic life. -- Margaret Mary Reher American Catholic Studies Renn boldly engages the complexities of women's lives globally, giving careful attention to the intersections of gender, culture, economics, and education... Women's Colleges and Universities in a Global Context is a rich resource for researchers and students interested in women's issues and the role of higher education in transforming the climate for women's equity across the world... With this book, Renn has further confirmed her well-deserved reputation as a preeminent scholar of higher education both within the US and internationally. Journal of College Student DevelopmentTable of ContentsContents: Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Faith, Knowledge, and Gender -Jill Ker Conway 2 Colleges of Religious Women's Congregations: The Spiritual Heritage - Monika K. Hellwig 3 American Catholic Colleges for Women: Historical Origins - Kathleen A. Mahoney 4 The Colleges in Context - Thomas M. Landy 5 Faculties and What They Taught - Karen Kennelly 6 The Philadelphia Story: Life at Immaculata, Rosemont, and Chestnut Hill - David R. Contosta 7 Sisterhoods and Catholic Higher Education, 1890-1960 - Mary J. Oates 8 Live Minds, Yearning Spirits: The Alumnae of Colleges and Universities Founded by Women Religious - Jane C. Redmont 9 Making It: Stories of Persistence and Success - Dorothy M. Brown and Carol Hurd Green 10 The Way We Are: The Present Relationship of Religious Congregations of Women to the Colleges They Founded - Melanie M. Morey Conclusion: Into the Future - Jeanne Knoerle and Tracy Schier Appendix A. American Colleges and Universities Founded by Women Religious for the Education of Lay Students - Thomas M. Landy Appendix B. Colleges Founded by Women Religious for Educating Sisters - Thomas M. Landy Notes Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThe material lives of rural upcountry women improved dramatically by midcentury-yet in becoming middle class, Walker concludes, the women found their experiences both broadened and circumscribed.Trade ReviewAn engaging study... For upcountry southern women, the years 1919-1941 were indicative of the economic, political, and social chaos existing throughout segregated America... Walker capably demonstrates how families were forced by the limitations of race and class to choose situations that provided little or no real opportunity, but she also brilliantly illustrates how some rural people were able to adapt to change. -- Valerie Grim Journal of American History Voices of ordinary women who experienced extraordinary changes resonate in Melissa Walker's incisive study of twentieth-century transformations of southern agricultural communities. -- Elizabeth D. Schafer H-SAWH, H-Net Reviews Melissa Walker has done an admirable job of mining oral interviews, TVA records, letters, diaries, and farming magazines to piece together the story of how women contributed to the family income... Walker deftly negotiates the intersection of race, class, and gender. -- Gaul Graham Journal of East Tennessee History Walker shows how women adapted to rapid change with courage, strength, creativity, and persistence... Walker's fine regional study will be useful to historians of women, the South, Appalachia, rural life, and labor issues. A valuable addition to the growing number of works on women in the early-twentieth-century South. -- Suzanne Marshall History: Reviews of New Books Historian Melissa Walker provides an account of changes in women's labor practices and economic activity in the upcountry South during the inter-war years... Readable, credible, and well-researched. -- Shaunna L. Scott Journal of Appalachian Studies The theme of the study is to show how the status of farm women changes from 1919-1941 in a period of economic crisis. Changing from a region of subsistence farming to one of commercial farming and interference by government action during the depression and New Deal years, women learned to cope... [Walker's] descriptions of rural ways and beliefs are true to form. -- Cline E. Hall South Carolina Historical Magazine Walker does a particularly good job of emphasizing the ambivalence that upcountry farm women felt about leaving the farms... All We Knew Was to Farm makes an extremely important contribution to rural literature by gendering the transformation of the upland South. -- Rebecca Sharpless Georgia Historical Quarterly Walker provides a much needed account of the South that should be of interest to all those who study the twentieth century. -- Kathleen Mapes Journal of Social History 2005Table of ContentsContents:List of Figures List of Tables AcknowledgementsIntroduction: "All We Knew Was to Farm" 1. Rural Life in the Upcountry South: The Scene in 1920 2. Making Do and Doing Without: Farm Women Cope with the Economic Crisis, 1920-1941 3. "Grandma Would Find Some Way to Make Some Money": Farm Women's Cash Incomes 4. Mixed Messages: Home Extension Work among Upcountry Farm Women in the 1920s and 1930s 5. Government Relocation and Upcountry Women 6. Rural Women and Industrialization 7. Farm Wives and Commercial Farming 8. "The Land of Do Without": The Changing Face of Sevier County, Tennessee, 1908-1940 Epilogue: The Persistence of Rural ValuesAbbreviations Notes Bibliographical Essay Index

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Book SynopsisMore than a history of the cookbook, Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking provides an absorbing and enlightening account of gender and food in modern America.Trade ReviewHave you ever wondered why women's cooking tends to be tired and routine, while men can make culinary magic with hotdogs, omelettes, and fried potatoes? Or why juicy steaks are man-food, while dainty salads are for women? These stereotypes may sit like a rock in the belly, but the message has been reinforced over the past century in American cookbooks, says Jessamyn Neuhaus, author of Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking. She explores generations of cookery instruction and finds they didn't stop at recipes for Jell-O salad and tuna casserole. From Fannie Farmer and The Joy of Cooking to The I Hate to Cook Book, cookbooks have long told women more than how much flour to put in their devil's food cake. They have reflected and reinforced social attitudes about the distinct roles of men and women... Readers-especially veteran home cooks-are likely to find Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking worth tasting. -- Julie Finnin Day Christian Science Monitor An engaging analysis... Neuhaus provides a rich and well-researched cultural history of American gender roles through her clever use of cookbooks. -- Sarah Eppler Janda History: Reviews of New Books Neuhaus examines a huge number of both well-known and obscure cookbooks, as well as hard-to-find magazine articles and offers persuasive evidence about the culture of the period. -- Barbara Haber Women's Review of Books An excellent addition to the history of women's roles in America, as well as to the history of cookbooks. Choice 2004 The book has many strengths, including excellent research and cogent presentation... Good enough to entice more scholars to step into the kitchen. Journal of American History 2004 The entire book is well researched and documented, helping readers to see that cookbooks have supported America's dominant ideologies about gender. -- Anne L. Bower Gastronomica 2004 Even if you missed Jell-O salads or Pu-Pu platters, after reading Neuhaus buying a cookbook will never be the same. -- Eileen Boris American Historical Review 2006Table of ContentsContents: Acknowledgments Introduction "The Purpose of a Cookery Book"PART ONE "A Most Enchanting Occupation": Cookbooks in Early and Modern America, 1796-1941One From Family Receipts to Fannie Farmer: Cookbooks in the United States, 1796-1920 Two Recipes for a New Era: Food Trends, Consumerism, Cooks, and Cookbooks Three "Cooking Is Fun": Women's Home Cookery As Art, Science, and Necessity Four Ladylike Lunches and Manly Meals: The Gendering of Food and CookingPART TWO "You are First and Foremost Homemakers: Cookbooks and the Second World WarFive Lima Loaf and Butter Stretchers Six "Ways and Means for War Days": The Cookbook-Scrapbook Compiled by Maude Reid Seven "The Hand That Cuts the Ration Coupon May Win the War": Women's Home-Cooked PatriotismPART THREE The Cooking Mystique: Cookbooks and Gender, 1945-1963Eight The Betty Crocker Era Nine "King of the Kitchen": Food and Cookery Instruction for Men Ten The Most Important Meal: Women's Home Cooking, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks Eleven "A Necessary Bore": Contradictions in the Cooking MystiqueConclusion From Julia Child to Cooking.comNotes Essay on Sources Index

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Book SynopsisIt cautions against framing debates over sexual material narrowly in terms of harm to children while highlighting the dangers of surrendering discourse about sexuality to the commercial realm.Trade ReviewWhat constitutes obscenity is a contentious issue, and Wheeler makes it clear that historically, it has been dangerous ground for feminists... Her analysis is convincing. Choice 2005 Wheeler's account of the anti-obscenity campaign illuminates the importance of gender to that history; she seamlessly explores the movement as it shifted from the local to the national level; and she meticulously recounts the day-to-day struggles women faced. Along the way, she draws on an impressive list of archival sources to reconstruct women's involvement in the campaign, provides a detailed account of the victories and hardships women experienced as they attempted to shape the... anti-obscenity movement, and offers a thoughtful and well-argued addition to a growing number of studies about women activists and how their concerns for mothers and children shaped public policy. American Historical Review 2005 Tells the complicated and compelling story of women's meteoric rise to prominence in competing branches of the anti-obscenity movement prior to and immediately following passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, and their arguably more rapid exit from the scene during the late 1920s and early 1930s... A superbly written book. -- Heather Lee Miller Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 2005 A welcome addition to the growing historiography of obscenity and censorship. In its solid research, Wheeler's book is [also] an important addition to the historiography of grassroots struggles over free speech and other rights in twentieth-century America. Journal of American History In this important book, Leigh Ann Wheeler examines a little-discussed corner of popular culture, women's campaigns to regulate 'obscenity' in the late 1800[s] and early 1900s. Those interested in issues of obscenity and the development of the concept of free speech in the United States will find Wheeler's work compelling. -- Lisa K. Boehm Journal of Popular Culture Wheeler has uncovered a fascinating chapter in the story of women's perennial attempts to protect children and vulnerable young women from the dangers of commercial vice. Her study considers several of these dangers, such as prostitution and burlesque shows, but focuses above all on the new medium of film. -- Cynthia Eagle Russett H-Net Book Review/H-SHGAPE Deftly illuminates the 'possibilities in our past' while addressing the complex struggles of women and citizens in more recent times. -- Hiroshi Kitamura American Quarterly 2006 The study gives a very good sense of the anti-obscenity reform activity and concern in the period under study. -- Encarna Trinidad Journal of American Studies 2006 This is a very good book about an important topic. -- Rebecca J. Mead Journal of Social History 2007 Wheeler's impressively researched study is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of anti-obscenity reform and women's activism in general. -- Christine Erickson American StudiesTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Crossing the Great Divide: Women, Politics, and Anti-obscenity Reform Chapter 1. " "Protect the Innocent!": Men, Women, and Anti-obscenity Reform, 1873 - 1911 Chapter 2. Dressing Elsie: Women's Theater Reform, 1912 - 1919 Chapter 3. "Censorship Does Not Protect": Women's Motion Picture Reform, 1919 - 1922 Chapter 4. "Woman vs. Woman": The Leading Ladies of Motion Picture Reform, 1923 - 1930 Chapter 5. "We Don't Want Our Boys and Girls in a Place of That Kind": Women's Burlesque Reform, 1925 - 1934 Chapter 6. "Thinking as a Woman and of Women": Sex Education, Obscenity's Antidote, 1925 - 1934 Chapter 7. "Sinful Girls Lead": Crises in Women's Motion Picture Reform, 1932 - 1934 Chapter 8. "'Catholic Action' is Blazing a Spectacular Trail!": The Collapse of Women's Anti-obscenity Leadership, 1934 - 1935 Conclusion: Anti-obscenity Reform and Women's History List of Abbreviations Notes Notes on Sources Index

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Book SynopsisIt provides an argument for the evaluation of religious lives and their struggles for meaning and power in the contemporary landscape of critical theory.Trade Review[A] provocative exploration of possession theory... Keller is able to offer not only fresh insight into possession phenomena but also a penetrating critique of the categories and concepts with which it has been theorized. -- Kelly E. Hayes Journal of Religion 2004 Keller's argument for a revisioning of agency, women, and possession is important intervention. By bringing together an unusual mix of theorists and case studies, she makes a thoughtful contribution to the study of religion, gender, and post-colonial theory that raises provocative questions for all scholars of religion. -- Pamela E. Klassen History of Religions 2004 A welcome addition to scholarly literature on spirit possession. It provides an innovative exploration into the agency of women's possessed bodies and the way scholarly representations construct agency. -- Margaret J. Rausch Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2005Table of ContentsContents: The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession Introduction Part 1: Re-Orienting Possession in Theory Chapter One: Signifying Possession Chapter Two: Re-Orienting Possession Chapter Three: Flutes, Hammers and Mounted Women Part II: The Work, War and Play of Possession Chapter Four: Work Chapter Five: War Chapter Six: Play(s) Conclusion Bibliography

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Book SynopsisMore than new chapters in automobile history, these stories locate women motorists within twentieth-century debates about class, gender, sexuality, race, and nation.Trade ReviewThis is an extremely interesting book in that it provides the reader with a different perspective on the automobile age and what it meant to women as well as society as a whole... A must-have book for anyone interested in women's history. The photographs of various women traveling or involved in mechanical work are a great addition as well. It is a fascinating look at the way that cars freed many women and started us on the path to greater 'mechanical' equality with men. -- Marcia A. Lusted Academia 2008 Georgine Clarsen has produced a fascinating account of women motorists in the first three decades of the automobile age. Her crisp and elegant prose takes the reader on a speedy trip over a wide range of terrain, indicating the importance of the car in the cultural politics of the early 20th century. -- Sean O'Connell Reviews in History 2009 Presents an excellent case study of the ways in which new technologies take on gendered meanings in the process of their social integration... Highly readable book. -- Anne Clendinning American Historical Review 2009 For anyone wanting to fully understand early automotive history, this book is a necessary read. -- Dennis E. Horvath Cruise-in.com 2009 This study holds great value, helping readers to appreciate the rich history of women's involvement in things mechanical... Recommended. Choice 2009 Eat My Dust stands as an impressive account of women's engagement with numerous aspects of automobile culture and thus with the ways that technology shapes and is shaped by concerns of gender, race, and the body. -- Deborah Clarke Technology and CultureTable of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction1. Movement in a Minor Key: Dilemmas of the Woman Motorist2. A War Product: The British Motoring Girl and Her Garage3. A Car Made by English Ladies for Others of Their Sex: The Feminist Factory and the Lady's Car4. Transcontinental Travel: The Politics of Automobile Consumption in the United States5. Campaigns on Wheels: American Automobiles and a Suffrage of Consumption6. "The Woman Who Does": A Melbourne Women's Motor Garage7. Driving Australian Modernity: Conquering Australia by Car8. Machines as the Measure of Women: Cape-to-Cairo by AutomobileConclusionsNotesEssay on SourcesIndex

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Book SynopsisBy investigating how cars can function as female space, reflect female identity, and reshape female agency, this engaging study opens up new angles from which to approach fiction by and about women and traces new directions in the intersection of literature, technology, and gender.Trade ReviewBy bringing her expertise in literature and women's studies to bear on automobility, Clarke adds to our understanding of both the lived and the imaginary potential of the automobile in women's lives. -- Kathleen Franz Technology and Culture 2008 Important work. -- Kris Lackey Studies in American Fiction 2008 Astute and thoroughly researched study. -- Laura L. Behling Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2008Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Writing and Automobility1. Women on Wheels: "A threat at yesterday's order of things"2. Modernism: Racing and Gendering Automobility3. My Mother the Car? Auto Bodies and Maternity4. Getaway Cars: Women's Road Trips5. Mobile Homelessness: Cars and the Restructuring of Home6. Automotive Citizenship: Car as OriginEpilogue: Writing behind the WheelNotesWorks CitedIndex

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